How to automate your event promotion?

Growth hacking can do a lot of things for your business. When it comes to organizing events, there is a clear path to walk on. It takes a lot of efforts to gather all the attendees, speakers, logistics and more. This is why you need a growth hacker in your team in order to make good choices regarding marketing. Here is a list of steps you have to follow in order to make your event full of participants.

What are the biggest steps in the event success process? If it’s the first edition of your event, this is going to be the hardest because you have nothing to show from the previous edition and sometimes it’s harder to get sponsors. The 3 majors steps are before, during and after. The during and after are important because they are the before of your next year edition.

Before the event:

Analyse competitors, get the attention of their followers. Scrape their followers lists. Automate the Like and retweet process.

Create an audience with previous edition participants and grow it with people who have similar interests.

Create the landing page or ensure the website converts, the design is adapted to the audience, keywords are in place,message is clear.

Create or ensure the social media platforms are created and active.

Ensure the analytics are in place to ensure not loosing one lead.

Create sales funnels to grab emails.

Create a list of “brand” ambassadors to reach out and make sure they pass the message properly.

Create a list of Facebook groups to reach the target audience, use 5 different Facebook profiles to share in these groups.

Create a list of ‘job titles” on Linkedin to reach out the target people, connect with them, send them private messages.

During the event:

You must remember to take great pictures, to activate your sponsors and to record quality videos. This will make next year promotional job so much easier if you have done this step properly.

After the event:

The work has just started my friend…for next year at least. Don’t forget to send a thank you email to all participants, asking them to send some of their own pictures. Give away next year tickets in exchange for comments and reviews.

Keep people posted, ask attendees for speakers ideas, keep sharing pictures every day, give discounts, etc. It’s time to make your life easier to help you focus on what matters before the event.

What do you think about this strategy? After experimenting this workflow for 7 startup weekends,1 startup pirates, 4 hardware accelerator bootcamps, a product manager conference in Portugal, SITIC Africa-Canada, Afrique Numérique, and more than 20 other events, this is my go-to strategy. We all have a lot to learn and organizing events is such a thrilling job. Every single events has its own challenge and I’m ready for a new one.

If you want to add a step to this strategy, feel free to write it in the comments below. I would also invite you to join the Growth hacker lounge where we have daily growth marketing topics to discuss. See you around.